How to Eat a Chicken Wing: Eat All of It

Our resident wing fanatic explains how to extract maximum gustatory pleasure from a chicken wing.

The internet is littered with videos about the right way to eat chicken wings, and they usually involve a host telling you to twist the bones just so in order to pull the bones out in one swift motion. These videos are three percent useful, and 97%... not. For some things, a lesson matters. Demonstrating how to get the meat out of the hard shell and hidden crevices of a lobster has real utility, but I'm pretty sure most of us can figure out how to tear chicken meat off the bone without a primer. We've got teeth, let's use 'em.

Closeup of a glistening Buffalo wing.

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

So this video is not about how to eat chicken wings. It's about how thoroughly you should eat them.

I'm the first to admit that I'm a complete jerk about this, but I can't help it. When I see wings discarded with mouthfuls of meat and skin left on the bone, I get peeved—clearly, since I felt passionate enough about it to make this video. Of course, people have every right to eat chicken wings however they want, and there's not a thing I can do about it. But if I ever find myself at the same table with a thriftless wing eater, I insist they order their own plate. They can waste their own wings, not mine.

May 2018